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I'm hoping this is the best community for this - Whilst not directly graphical, I'm thinking it is related to a print option in Adobe Acrobat, but, I can't seem to find it.

I have a bunch of bank statements that have rather a large margin on the left in order to be hole punched and added to a ring binder.

I unfortunately need to keep paper records, but, some of these statements are 6/7 pages, and I want to save paper, so, I want to print double sided.

When I print double sided, if I hole punch the first page, it goes through content on the other side!

Without going in to Illustrator and manually adjusting the PDFs, is there any easy/quick print option that can auto adjust the margin on every evenly printed page?

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  • You might be able to do this with acrobat scripting. I just dont have acrobat at home, and have never tried. Instead i know you can do this with ghostscript, would you be able to accept ghostscript answers?
    – joojaa
    Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 7:29
  • @Joojaa, I have never used (and don't know how to use) ghostscript, but, if it is something that gets the end goal and works, I'm happy to do it!
    – William Hilsum
    Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 8:37

2 Answers 2

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You can do this with GhostScript from a commandline/batchfile like this:

gswin64c -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dBATCH ^
  -dNOPAUSE -sOutputFile=out.pdf ^
  -c "<< /BeginPage { 2 mod 1 eq {-50 0 translate} {} ifelse } bind  >> setpagedevice"^
  -f in2.pdf

Adjust the -50 to be as many points (1 ps point is 72th part of an inch) you want to shift the graphics on the page. The example is assuming windows if not change gswin64c to gs and ^ to \ . Beware do not put spaces after ^ on windows.

You could also do a lot of other things with ghostscript such as add headers, footers, stamps etc.

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  • I just tried this, but, it doesn't appear to actually work, I adjusted the -50 to be -200, and opened the original alongside the otuput file, but, they look the same...
    – William Hilsum
    Commented Aug 8, 2014 at 18:05
  • hard to debug, anyway I had one pdf of around 50 tested where it for some reason did not work nicely and offset an arbiyrary ammount, i suspect there is some global scale going on in that pdf. So its certainly possible to have a pdf thats substantially harder to manipulate. Did you get any errors?
    – joojaa
    Commented Aug 8, 2014 at 22:13
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There are a few places to look at. You might look at the print dialog provided by the printer driver (just ignore the message from Acrobat/Reader that you are leaving the print dialog), and see what options you have.

If that does not lead to the desired results, you could crop the pages (requiring Acrobat); you can crop even and odd pages. With the pages properly cropped, you can try to print again on you double sided printer (which should have the possibility to place the page accordingly.

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  • I looked at the print dialog for some time and was unable to find anything. More than just bank statements, I have some suppliers that send invoices - all of which have ring binder holes marked out on the left... It will be a PITA to manually crop something... I really want to find an automated answer/option that will do it.
    – William Hilsum
    Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 8:40
  • OK… the cropping (or modifying the pages) can be done using JavaScript (have a look at the setPageBox / getPageBoxes methods of the Doc object). This then can be turned into an Action, and that should take care of the issues. In fact, it should be possible to include the print command into the action as well.
    – Max Wyss
    Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 9:49

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